In a field so long neglected in film studies, the series on sound and music in various genres which frames this volume is most welcome. Under the series editorship of Mark Evans, in addition to this publication we have had collections on animation, sexuality and science fiction, with others to come including on comedy and fantasy. The sixteen essays here on horror films draw on a broad range of approaches to the field, including musicological, semiotic, narratological, structuralist, hermeneutic, ethnological and psycho-analytic. The presentist tendency that characterises so much cultural and specifically film analysis is countered here by deeper historical perspectives. Apart from editor Philip Hayward's succinct Introduction which reviews the history of the genre and its music, he has a hand in several of the essays, along with articles by, for example, Michael Hannan, James Wierzbicki, Jeremy Barham in which references to broader historical contexts confer greater authority on the studies. The understanding of sound and in particular the sonicity of music is agreeably generous: silence, volume, instrumental timbres and, particularly in Evans's piece on The Exorcist, rhythm.

It is all too easy to cavil at the coverage in a collection like this. If I were to express a regret at an omission of a particular film, it would be Jack Clayton's 1961 The Innocents, perhaps the most effective of all supernatural films and, I am sure, model for the The Others, which is referred to here. There were several points where The Innocents was a candidate for mention. But the film's omission from the supposed top ten horror films Total Film's poll of 2005 (listed p.134), puts me in my place, so, having got that out of the way, I also recognise that the editor of such a collection is very much at the mercy of the range of responses from potential contributors. Although dominated by US output (and again, that is something largely determined by the contributor profile), it is gratifying to see that situation challenged by the inclusion of studies of Japanese (Wierzbicki, Kyoko Koizumi), Italian (Tony Mitchell) and Australian (Hayward and Harry Minassian) films.

Such a wide-ranging collection raises the question of how the study of sound is vindicated in a medium (and in an academic culture) all too often dominated by visuality. To some extent, that vindication is on the same terms as visualist studies: we learn more about how film in general functions, and about specific films, directors and local cinematic traditions. We also learn more about cultural politics and theory, and in particular, the limits of scopocentrically generated cultural theory when applied to sonic experience. I couldn't quite see what I was learning about when Lacan is laminated over sonicity, unless it is the limits of the former's theoretical typologies. But more generally, these essays demonstrate the complex semiotic and narratological functions of film music and sound design, not just as an affective supplement, but in constructing destabilising tensions and conflicting ontologies, as for example in the essays by Mitchell, Hayward and Jon Fitzgerald, and Karen Collins; and Laura Wiebe demonstrates how music can close the comforting visual gap between ordinary American life and the monstrous ‘other’. Thus far, I am talking about film and sound in general. This is a genre-based collection, so do we learn anything about the distinctiveness of ‘horror’ sound? We come closest to this in studies of horror film sub-genres, as in Janet K. Halfyard's and Michael Hannan's examinations of vampire movies, or of music sub-genres as in the essay on the use of metal in horror films, by Lee Barron and Ian Inglis.

The registers of metal take me to what I would suggest is perhaps the leading sonic feature of horror music. Try this: fear is a key audience response in this genre. Sounds produce fear when they cannot be localised (that is, what is called the ‘ubiquity effect’ – see further Johnson 2010). Rebecca Coyle notes in her study of The Blair Witch Project that the growing alarm of its protagonists is expressed in the feeling that certain sounds seem to be coming from everywhere. There are very particular kinds of sound that produce the ubiquity effect. Because we localise sounds primarily through the way the head blocks sounds, producing discrepancies between each ear, any sound whose wavelength is greater than (and therefore not blocked by the head) will produce varying levels of anxiety. This is because of the ‘quick and dirty’ path from the ear, bypassing the cortex, straight to amygdala, the seat of affect. The resulting ‘fight or flight’ response is involuntary and irrevocable. And the sonic parameter which most effectively produces this is low frequency noise (LFN, as it is referred to in scientific journals). Most of the contributors to this collection incorporate reference to pitch, and in many cases this includes LFN. Karen Collins comes closest to identifying this as the most characteristic sound in horror films when she includes ‘low thunderous rumbling … which impacts upon the listener/viewer physically’ (210) in the sonic repertoire. Pitch traverses and conditions the sonic politics that differentiate the threat from the threatened (witness the shower scene in Psycho and the opening scene of Jaws), and is also related to the gendering of threat, partly because normally women naturally have higher pitched voices than men, as is hinted by Hannan in his discussion of Hammer films. The suggestion that there is a natural – that is a transcultural and even transpecial – relationship between the experience of fear and LFN is not explicit in this collection, but can be persuasively extrapolated from the essays. More generally, the volume is always an instructive and often revelatory addition to the growing body of work on film sound, and I would suggest that it is required reading in the field.